"If, in spite of the home advantage, a Ströbeck player was about to walk into a trap set by the visiting opponent, members of the audience were allowed to shout out the warning “Vadder, mit Rat!” meaning “Father, be careful” in the local dialect."

"Technologies are so developed now that theoretically, since the games were broadcast live, Ivanov’s friends in the neighbouring room, from Sofia, or even from the Antarctic, could have sent him hints for his moves through chips, which could have been placed under the skin, in the ear, or in the teeth."

"Rooklike is a lot like chess, with a few key exceptions: You move every single one of your pieces during your turn. There's no such thing as a checkmate — you win by capturing every black piece. The boards are arbitrarily sized, and can have walls which block movement."

"This is [an] effective opening, simple to play and easy to remember, which I have invented for use against a more experienced player who is absolutely certain to win. It consists of making three moves at random and then resigning."

Figures moving slowly through a grim, black-and-white, 15th-century Swedish apocalypse, pursued by an oddly pranksterish Death. Had forgotten about the slowed, priest-fuelled, mediaeval end of the end of the world.

Eleusian chess. "On their turn, a Player attempts to move or invoke one of their pieces, and the Spectator for that piece declares whether the action is legal or illegal. If it is legal, that Player's turn ends and play passes to the other Player."

"The pawns could easily get together and reject the whole concept of the checkerboard system. All the other pieces would be set into disarray and the pawns would win democratically, but by a huge majority."

Plastic, tabletop Laser Chess with embedded laser-pointer lights. Brilliant. "Do not press your button until you have checked that all pieces are secured in the board and not angled up toward a player."

Interview with a chessboxer. "After a boxing round your heart will be beating, your adrenaline goes up and it's very difficult to concentrate on a chessboard. The first chess-boxing test that we ever did, I just gave away my queen immediately."

"Your army has been defeated and the forces of the Black King are spreading across the world." Nice ludemetic hybrid of chess and Rogue, where capturing a piece lets you inherit its powers. Slight unsatisfying air of "randomly generated puzzle", though.

Bobby Fischer's Chess960: "Pawns begin where they always do. However, the pieces behind them on the white side are arranged at random, with the proviso that bishops must end up on opposite colors, and the king dwell somewhere between the two rooks."

"Tesco has announced that sales of chess sets are booming and that its new own-brand set is selling at double the rate forecast. It attributes the sales spurt to the fact that celebrities such as Madonna play, and makes a startling claim: chess is trendy.

"The rook is a tower in many European languages (eg. Spanish and Portuguese torre, Finnish torni, French tour, Dutch toren), sometimes a large farm (Frisian stins), a ship (Russian ladya) or a wagon (Chinese ju, Estonian vanker)."